Early in the investigation, the police had retained the services of a pair of well-known handwriting experts: William J. Kinsley, editor of the venerable Penman’s Art Journal, and David Carvalho, who had been much in the news before Christmas for his role in a sensational blackmail trial involving robber baron Jay Gould.1 All penmanship samples relevant to the Adams-Barnet murders, beginning with the address scissored from the infamous poison package, were immediately turned over to these specialists. By Tuesday, January 17, they had already received the fake Cornish request found by Elsie Gray.
Now, having completed his own examination of the latest “Cornish” letter sent to Von Mohl Company, McCluskey planned to forward it to Kinsley and Carvalho. Even as he prepared to do so, another startling discovery was taking place in Cincinnati.
Up until that point, the newshounds in the pay of Pulitzer and Hearst had played a leading role in the investigation, not only goading the police into action but often beating them to important clues. This time, though, it was another paper—the New York Herald—that was ahead of the pack.
No sooner had its editors learned about the letter found among the files of Von Mohl Company than a telegram went out to the Herald’s Cincinnati stringer. Quickly repairing to the offices of the patent medicine firm, the reporter spoke to the manager, Joseph Brewster. Was it possible, he asked, that other correspondence signed with Cornish’s name might exist in the company’s records?
With the newsman looking on, Brewster began searching through the files. It wasn’t long before he came upon a piece of mail—still in its original envelope—whose handwriting bore a marked resemblance to that on the earlier “Cornish” letter. It, too, was a request for a five-day trial sample of the company’s widely advertised impotence cure, Calthos. Only this time, the sender had supplied a different address: 257 West Forty-second Street. And the signature on the letter—much to the astonishment of both the reporter and Brewster—wasn’t “H. Cornish.” It was “H. C. Barnet.”2
Though less given to blowing its own horn than its more shameless rivals, the Herald couldn’t keep from trumpeting the news of its “important and sensational discovery” in its morning edition. By the time its readers were learning of this stunning new development, a reporter for the Heraldwas already at the address given on the fake Barnet letter.
Number 257 West Forty-second Street turned out to be a shabby little “advertising agency” run by one Nicholas Heckmann, whose office, like Joseph Koch’s, was furnished with a rack of wooden pigeonholes that were rented out as private letter boxes. Questioned by the reporter, Heckmann recalled that the previous May, a well-dressed gentleman had come into his office, inquiring about a letter box. Heckmann knew the man by sight, having seen him around the neighborhood for years. When Heckmann quoted his fees, the man opted for the quarterly rate—$1.50. He then paid the money in advance and gave his name as Mr. H. C. Barnet, correcting Heckmann’s spelling when the latter added an extra t to the end of the name.
For the next few weeks, the gentleman picked up his mail every other day, generally in the late afternoon or early evening. Most of what he received appeared to come from various patent medicine concerns, including Von Mohl of Cincinnati, a firm that had stuck in Heckmann’s mind because the return address—Lincoln’s Inn Place—sounded so unusual.
Then, a month after renting the letter box, “Mr. Barnet” had abruptly ceased to show up. Heckmann had never seem him again, though various small packages and letters continued to arrive in his name. Heckmann—who generally held on to his customers’ uncollected mail for several months—still had a number of items addressed to “Barnet” in his possession and let the reporter examine them. There were letters from patent medicine firms in New York City, Detroit, and Ohio. Checking the postmarks, the reporter noticed that the most recent was dated November 29, 1898.
Or so he initially thought. Heckmann, however, drew his attention to an item that, by a strange coincidence, had arrived for “Barnet” just the previous morning—an advertising circular for a concoction called Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy, sold by a Professor F. C. Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut.
The Herald’s man had just finished studying this advertisement when the office door banged open and in strode two plainclothes detectives, Arthur Carey and his partner, William McCafferty. They had been dispatched to Heckmann’s place by Captain McCluskey, who had learned of the discovery of the fake Barnet letter only a short time earlier, when he’d seen that morning’s Herald. Taking Heckmann aside, the detectives began to question him in hushed, urgent tones. About twenty minutes later, after taking possession of all the Barnet material, they left.
By then, the reporter from the Herald was already on his way to the train station.3
He rode the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad to Connecticut, changing cars once at Valley Branch, then hiring a buggy to drive him five miles from Goodspeed Station to the little village of Moodus in the far eastern part of the state. When he arrived at the offices of Professor Fowler’s patent medicine operation, he spoke to the manager, George Hill, who began to look through the company’s files for any communication signed H. C. Barnet. Hill was still searching when Fowler himself showed up and took over the task. He combed his records for nearly two hours before he found what he was looking for.
It was a printed order sheet for the company’s ostensible impotency cure, Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy. The sender had enclosed the requisite fee—$3.12—and supplied some basic information, though he appeared to have filled in the blanks rather hastily. (In response to the question “Married or single?” for example, he had written “Yes.”) He indicated that he had been afflicted for ten years and that he suffered from an advanced stage of his condition. The name was given as H. C. Barnet and the return address as “Box #217, 257 West 42nd Street, NY City.”
In the judgment of the reporter—who had brought along a newspaper facsimile of the address from the poison package mailed to Harry Cornish—the handwriting was “exactly the same.”4 He was also struck by the postmark on the envelope: May 31, 1898.
Captain McCluskey, in the meanwhile, had started his own man for Moodus—a detective named Tinker. Unfortunately, Detective Tinker had missed a connection and found himself stranded in central Connecticut overnight. When McCluskey received a message from Tinker, the chief immediately wired Fowler, directing him to “send without delay any document in his possession signed by H. C. Barnet.”
By then, however, it was too late. Fowler (for an undisclosed monetary consideration) had turned over the “Barnet” order form to the reporter, who was already on his way back to New York City.5
The following day, the Herald ran a crowing headline, POLICE FOLLOWING THE HERALD’S CLEWS. The story described the “new and important clews” discovered by its intrepid reporter at Nicholas Heckmann’s letter box agency and Professor Fowler’s lab in Moodus, Connecticut. Noting that the order form sent to Fowler had been postmarked May 31, 1898, the newspaper concluded that the plot to murder Henry Barnet and Harry Cornish had been hatched as far back as the previous spring, then carried out with “fiendish deliberation.”
Fearing a libel suit, the paper refrained from naming a suspect. It did, however, mention a “strange coincidence.” Describing the uncollected letters that had arrived for “Barnet” at Heckmann’s place, the story noted that one of these had been postmarked November 19, 1898—“the very day that Blanche Chesebrough, who was said to be a close friend of H. C. Barnet, was married to Roland B. Molineux, who was known to be jealous of Miss Chesebrough because of Barnet’s admiration for her.”6
There was another odd coincidence that the Herald failed to note, though it would not escape the attention of later commentators. Of all the letters requesting impotence cures and marriage manuals mailed out under the names H. C. Barnet and H. Cornish (and there would turn out to be many of them), all were postmarked either in the spring or fall of 1898. None had been mailed out in July or August—the months when Roland Molineux was out of the country on his summer trip to Europe.
While the Herald was claiming bragging rights for the latest discoveries in the case, Detective Carey was quietly pursuing another lead.
Among the uncollected “Barnet” mail that he and McCafferty had confiscated at Heckmann’s was a letter from the Marston Remedy Company of 19 Park Place, Manhattan. Proceeding to that address, Carey spoke to the owner, Dr. Vincent G. Hamill, who, in searching through his records, came upon the four-page “diagnosis blank” filled out by the man who signed himself H. C. Barnet.
Though the questionnaire required little more than one-or two-word answers, it was a revealing document. From it, Carey learned that the sender suffered from recurrent bouts of impotence, had contracted a case of gonorrhea three years earlier, and was “contemplating marriage.” Carey also discovered that there was at least one case of consumption—tuberculosis—in the man’s family. In the space marked “Age,” the applicant had written “31.”
Carey was particularly struck by the chest and waist measurements given by the sender—thirty-seven and thirty-two inches respectively. Carey had never met Henry Barnet, but from what he had read and heard, he knew that the murdered clubman had been stout. He also knew that Barnet had been thirty-two years old at the time of his death.
Carey took possession of the questionnaire and left. Within twenty-fours hours—by asking around at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club—he had found out the name of Roland Molineux’s tailor. A trip to the shop confirmed what Carey already surmised. Molineux’s chest and waist measurements corresponded exactly to those given on the “diagnosis blank.”
A few days later, Carey was able to ascertain that Molineux’s maternal grandmother had died of consumption several years earlier in East Hartford, Connecticut. He also obtained a copy of Molineux’s birth certificate from the Board of Health. It showed that, at the time the questionnaire was submitted, Roland Molineux was thirty-one.7